[Android Apps and Games] madmack:
Before asking questions, please read the FAQ.

Introduction:

I saw the idea posted somewhere previously that instead of getting the capacitive lights on, we really should be putting the phone's AMOLED screen to work ! specially that it doesn't consume any backlight energy when displaying a black screen. So I developed an app that does just that: upon receiving a notification, it will display a black screen with a dot or icon somewhere in the screen. I really should put these in bullet points..

Description:

the application does the following:

1. When your phone receives a notification, it switches the screen on and displays a notification. The notification bounces around every 3 seconds (changeable via an option). This will guarantee using different LEDs so that the same ones won't be burned out.

2. You can customize whether to have a dot or an icon for each type of supported notification. Users may also customize the colors of these icons/dots.

3. NoLED will work with SMS/MMS, Gtalk, Gmail, Missed calls, Voicemail, Calendar and K-9 (email client) without any additional permissions. Any other 3rd party software (e.g. Whatsapp, Email app, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail) will need to be checked under Monitored Apps and will require granting Accessibility rights to NoLED.

4. The app runs as a service, after installing, you have two ways to activate the app. (a) by restarting. (b) by loading the widget into your home screen and clicking on it.

5. To get rid of the notification screen, you may use the home or the back key. You can enable dismissal via more keys in the Miscellaneous submenu. Once your notifications are dismissed, all notifications disappear and will not come back up.

I have also logged the touch drivers and saw that although I'm displaying a black screen and setting flags to not respond to touch messages, android is still receiving touch messages when you touch any spot on the screen. This, I imagine, consumes resources! So I disabled the touch drivers when the black screen is active. Dismissing the notifications should reactive the touch drivers. If your screen is unresponsive to touch even after the notification screen is dismissed, a simple restart should take care of it. There is also an option to completely disable that feature. The touch drivers are only disabled on the Samsung Galaxy S variants, all other devices are still receptive to touch events.

Now the touchscreen drivers were a lot easier to mess around with. The sourcecode given by samsung helped me achieve the activation/deactivation of the screen. Things are not the same with the capacitive buttons. You'll notice that when the black screen is on, if you touch any of the soft buttons, they'll light up (although am suppressing them programatically). On some other devices like the Nexus S, these backlights cannot be switched off once the screen is turned on programatically. This is a bug from Google and more info is in the FAQ.

Video review:

Thank you totallydubbedHD for giving us this neat preview of the app:

[YOUTUBE]1TuVkRSYYGA[/YOUTUBE]

Themes:

Want to change the default icons that ship with NoLED?

Check out Themes:

http://www.devasque.com/noled/themes.php

Official web site:

http://www.devasque.com/noled/

Translations:

NoLED is translated into several languages thanks to our army of volunteers ! More details can be found at: http://www.devasque.com/noled/translations.php

If you think you can help expand that list, please see this link

I appreciate all the help we can get on this.

Enjoy ! Comments and feedback will be appreciated

Update 8/11/2010: Application is now on the Android Market.

If you like this work and want to motivate and encourage further development, please consider a donation :)

Thanks